School’s start ushers in the slow season

Sunday

Aug 18, 2013 at 12:01 AM

By MARK LANEmark.lane@news-jrnl.com

When I saw my son’s grad school would be starting classes on the Tuesday after Labor Day, I was beside myself with nostalgia and the warm feeling that somebody somewhere was standing up for the Natural Order of Things.People forget that before high-stakes testing defined Florida schools, the slow season in beach towns started abruptly the day after Labor Day. Some years, it felt like there was a fire drill and the whole beach area emptied.Now, as perhaps is fitting, the slow season starts, well, slowly.I always explain to people who might come here that in coastal Florida these things you call “seasons” have more to do with the flow of people rather than any climate change.Spring – which here includes February – is full-out, caught-in-traffic, restaurant-is-full tourist season, the special event season. Then, summer is the regular tourist season. But then, sometime after Labor Day, there will come a weekend when you look up and down the beach and wonder where everybody went. When you find yourself pulling into the front row in the off-beach parking lot. That’s the slow season. For the regular beach walker, this is a good time. You move without looking behind you for cars. You have big stretches to yourself. The birds are happier.And even now, the wind-down is in the works. This weekend, the weekend before school begins, marks its start. And as much as I love the slow season and welcome its arrival each year, this always feels too early.Too early because a peak-season beach has its own pleasures, no matter what beach connoisseurs say.It’s a time the usually solitary beach walker gets to be a people watcher, too. And within only a few miles can be brought thoroughly up-to-date on all current fashions in tattooing. It’s a time when beach traffic backs up at the beach ramps and beach cyclists can roll smugly past slowed cars.But school and schedules puts the brakes on this happy season. And this would happen even sooner if Florida statute did not forbid – with one narrow exception – schools from opening earlier than 14 days before Labor Day.The Legislature passed this in 2006 because schools were opening in July to cram in prep days before the Big Tests. No Florida public school has opened after Labor Day since 1997, the year before the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test started redefining the school year.A bill to allow schools to open 23 days before Labor Day died last session but will probably reappear. Nobody respects the concept of summer anymore.When my kids were school age and school start days were poised to slip off the edge of August, I felt cheated when back-to-school and Fourth of July sales overlapped. It is depressing to make everyone wear shoes in the middle of summer. Now I’m resigned to the early school and the attendant easing into the slow season. And even though I’m no longer policing anyone’s shoe choices, I can’t ever shake the nagging feeling that I’m rushing the calendar unnaturally.

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